In a wireless communication system, when User Equipment UE or a machine terminal device (hereunder uniformly described as UE for simplicity) has data which need to be sent, firstly a resource for sending data needs to be acquired. In the related art, UE usually acquires a resource by adopting one of the following two ways.
One way for acquiring a resource is that UE firstly makes a request for a resource to a network, and the network sends a grant to the UE by adopting a scheduling manner; and the UE detects the grant and then acquires the resource allocated by the network to the UE according to the indication of the grant. This way has the disadvantage that much signaling overhead and processing delay are needed. Besides, when the resource allocated by the network is on an unlicensed carrier, the network usually needs to firstly contend for the resource by itself, and only after the contention succeeds, the network can allocate partial or all contended resources to the UE which applies for the resources. By taking processing time of an LTE system as an example, supposing that the network successfully contends for a resource of M subframes at a subframe n, and not considering scheduling delay, the network sends an uplink grant at a subframe (n+1), and the UE can use the uplink resource indicated by the uplink grant for sending data only at a subframe (n+5) at fastest and the data are completely transmitted at a subframe (n+6). In other words, the network successfully contends for the resource of at least six subframes, such that the last subframe thereof can be used for uplink sending. This way for acquiring a resource decreases the utilization efficiency of resources to a certain extent. Particularly, when there are many UEs which need to send data in the network, for example, in a Massive Machine Communication MMC scenario, each network possibly has tens of thousands of UEs, and at this moment the signaling overhead and processing delay would be more serious. Moreover, the problem of collision caused by a reason that a plurality of UEs contend for the same contention opportunity is brought, and the resource utilization efficiency is decreased more obviously.
The other way for acquiring a resource is that UE acquires the resource base on a mode of contending with other UE on one or some carriers. This way has already been widely applied in WLAN systems. However, when the number of UEs is comparatively great, for the reason of contention conflict, i.e., the problem of collision caused by a reason that a plurality of UEs contend for the same contention opportunity, the situation of rapid decrease of resource utilization efficiency will be also caused.